What Permissions are requested during the installation of my Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard?

* Please note that certain devices may use different wording to describe these permissions.*

Find accounts on this deviceThis is used to make it easier for you to link accounts such as Google and Facebook to your Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard for cloud personalization. Rather than having to manually log in to each service, you can simply pick the relevant account from a list, saving time with authentication.

Read SMS or MMS: During the first run setup of your Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard, we personalize from your sent SMS messages in order to establish a base for your personalized language model. This model remains local on your device unless you sign up for a Microsoft SwiftKey Account, where it may form part of the data that is backed up and synced.

Photos / Media / Files:We use this to store language packs, configuration data and themes on the SD card/external storage of the phone or tablet, as this would take up too much of the device’s internal storage. This is a standard and recommended practice.

Modify/delete SD card contents: Microsoft SwiftKey stores your learned language file on your SD card (or equivalent). We are constantly fine-tuning your learned language file based upon your own communication patterns. When you add new words to your Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard, this file will be modified to provide you with Microsoft SwiftKey user-specific predictions. Themes are also saved to the SD card.

Manage internal storage contents: We store some information on your internal storage to enable us to improve performance.

Read phone state and identity: This is used to generate a unique identifier for your device, which helps when tracking bug reports and errors, as well as providing you with support. Your device's IMEI is used to generate this unique identifier, but we cannot deduce the actual IMEI based on the identifier itself.

Error reports are automatically sent silently in the background on the rare occasions the app crashes. However, they do not contain personal data - only programming crash analytics that we use to determine the problem in the software, as is standard with most popular apps. We use this to fix the bugs that have caused any crashes.

Full Internet access / Wifi / Network Access:This is required to allow your Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard to download language modules so that you can benefit from our prediction technology. It allows the keyboard to take advantage of our optional cloud services, including Personalization, Backup & Sync, downloading themes and for error reports. All data is handled using anonymized requests. It also allows for our optional Location sharing feature. See our privacy policy for more details on how we protect your data.

Access Location:In order to use the Microsoft SwiftKey Location Sharing feature we send your GEO point and WiFi information to Bing's Location recognition service. We only retrieve your Location results once (when the Location panel is opened) and your Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard doesn't ever store this Location data.

Control Vibration:We need this permission to allow users to edit/turn on or off their keypress vibration.

Prevent Device from Sleeping:We require this permission to stop the phone going to sleep when we are, for example, in the middle of doing a backup for those users who have opted in to the Backup & Sync service from their Microsoft SwiftKey Account.

Run at Startup:This ensures your Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard is started at the right time after your phone or tablet boots.